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openSUSE 11.4 Milestone 6 arrives

Originally scheduled to be released on 20 January, the openSUSE project has announced the arrival of the sixth and final milestone release for version 11.4 of the openSUSE Linux distribution. The sixth milestone (M6) will be followed by two release candidates, the first of which is scheduled for 20 February. The final version of openSUSE is due in March of 2011.

Based on the 2.6.37 Linux kernel, openSUSE 11.4 Milestone 6 sees the complete removal of the HAL (hardware abstraction layer) and features the KDE SC 4.6 RC2 desktop, as well as GNOME 2.32.1 – the developers plan to include GNOME 2.32.2 and KDE 4.6 (the final version was released just a few days ago). The Xfce desktop environment was also updated to version 4.8.0. Package updates in the sixth milestone include Scribus 1.3.9, VirtualBox 4.0.2 and GnuCash 2.4.0. The OpenOffice.org office suite was replaced with the LibreOffice community fork in the previous milestone.

The developers also note that a "lively discussion" is currently taking place as to which version of Firefox should be included in the distribution when it ships – the latest stable Firefox 3.6.13 version or a Firefox 4 beta. The "limited availability of popular extensions for version 4 versus the short upstream maintenance period of Firefox 3 releases" is said to be at the heart of the debate.

As this release is aimed at developers, testers and community members, use in production environments and on mission critical systems is not advised. Users testing the release are encouraged to provide feedback and report any bugs that they encounter.

Further information about the latest milestone can be found in the official release announcement. The sixth milestone for openSUSE 11.4 is available to download for 32- and 64-bit systems as a DVD or LiveCD image from the project's developer / get it section. The latest stable version is openSUSE 11.3 from mid-July 2010.